Four Sonnets

Surfing the Web

Artillery shells on the Buddha’s Bamyan cliff, Talibanic acid flung in the veiled schoolgirl’s face, Qaeda beheadings taped for a medieval riff Streamed with the web’s “Allahu Akbar’s” podcast trace. Words alone among the silences they lattice in sleepless nights in the world wide web’s tendrils conjure Fatehpur Sikri’s red sandstone palace where Islam arched religions with Sufi spandrils. Akbar’s grieving shade waits in the Diwan, alone. In Waziristan, CIA drones fly above in the full moonlight on the huts of sand and stone, circling coils of the serpent on wings of the dove.Towers fall; ruins stand. Our oil-derricked lyresUntune the sky as Gaza burns in brimstone fires.

Choir Boys

Not the organ answering Job out of the whirlwind, nor the tiny pointed notes of the harpsichord– metallic and discrete as knights in armories unfurled and elevated above the clubbed blood of churlish battle or bones struck on mammoth skulls, nor the sun’s arteries drained in stained glass truncheons; bound in cassocks to their claustral occulted place where priestly functions anoint the choir boys’ throats in Borborite eucharist older than the Mass, cherub buttocks lean on the misericord’s hard love tangled in wings of the dove and coils of the snake that soon break sunset’s shaft on the rising full moon;but now the pianoforte in thundering hallsbreaks the hold in revolution’s noisy applause.

A Dandelion

If a self is formed to favor itself more effectively than a gest in light of tender obliging considerate leaves who’d thrust no place on continental shelf, nor claim on distant islands their birth right with seeds clinging to shores in tidal heaves; if nature born in bacterial spawn in thermal vents, desert sand, and arctic ice shows no regard for self-less courtesy– to play croquet on smoothly leveled lawn, or gamble without chance with weighted dice,or cover fists with gloved diplomacy,this dandelion breaking through concreteis life’s answer to Buddha’s middle street.

The Ant

Maybe when we look at an ant we’re not seeing an individual being– a communist contentedly living for needs, not hoping for more than he’s got. Maybe it’s merely one single neuron in the nest’s highly distributed brain. Did the learned scientists on Krypton choose Earth because ants had learned to entrain the Many in One long before Plato? The Buddha tried to teach proud, grasping men, taking Sankhya and turning it to Zen, that Self was not worth the bother to know.If by boiling water it turns to air,maybe hot selves are neurons unaware.